Overclocking my i5-4670K, help?

[farmeeli]

I have an i5-4670K, and I was thinking of overclocking it. I have a 650w psu, and my system only uses about 420w. I have 2 660 Ti's, one overclocked. I have two basic case fans on top and on the back, and venting on one side, plus front, top, and bottom. What should I overclock it by? Will it really make a difference in older games like skyrim or newer ones like wolfenstein:tno?

update: I purchased the cooler master hyper 212 evo. I also got two cooler master sickleflow 120s. Now that I have those, what should I bump everything up to? Also, my motherboard is a Z87 Extreme4.

 

[byza]

Do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler?

 

[farmeeli]

Do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler?

Nope. Any suggestions?

 

[byza]

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO is excellent value at under $30 and great for beginning to overclock.

Depending on the quality of your chip you could expect anywhere from 4.2GHz if your chip is not so good to 4.6GHz if it's good. Higher or lower is possible, but between these numbers is what I often see with the EVO.

I don't have a 4670K so I can't tell you anything from my personal experience but this is from another member that I read on here discussing overclocking the 4670k with a 212 EVO.

"I'd also consider just trying a quick high clock to test your chip. Something in the range of 4.4/4.5ghz at about 1.250 volts. If you can be stable then that gives you a good starting point and also lets you know if you chip is above/below or just average.

I have the same chip/cooler in a MSI z87 g45 motherboard. I tried 4.4ghz at 1.250 and I would boot but instantly crash as windows loaded up, then I pulled back to 4.3ghz, booted into windows, ran the intel tuning utility stress test and BSOD came up within 10 mins, then I went down to 4.2ghz, tested and it was fine. I slowly moved the voltage down, got it to about 1.220 stable, any lower at say 1.210 and it will BSOD after a bit of stressing.

Thats with leaving the ring/cache ratio to its default of 3800 (38x) mhz. I'd say my chip is average at best as I seen people claim they can get 4.4 or even 4.5ghz at voltages well below 1.200. 1.250 voltage was my treshold as I did not want to run at or too close to 1.300 as this will be my 24/7 clock.

As for temperatures running at 4.2ghz at 1.220 volts, I'm in the 58-65C under load and highest I've seen it go is 68C. Idle its around 40C.

Also just a heads up, with haswell, if you use adaptive voltage, certain stress tests will pull extra voltage and may overpower your cooler. I know its been said Prime 95 does so, I used intel burn test which did it for me. I had I believe set voltage to 1.220 when I was testing, I had CPU-Z open and saw my volts shoot up to around 1.320 and my temp shot up to 96C real quick and then I stopped the stress test as I did not want to hit 100C."

 

[Y0GI]

Here is a really good thread which helped me to get my i5 4670K up to 4.6 GHz: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1722630/intel-god-quick-dirty-guide-4ghz-haswell.html

Do get a good cooler first though.

Yogi